Monday, June 06, 2011

A growing body of journalistic evidence points to the conclusion that the tendency to reduce all human thoughts and feelings to material or chemical states may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. The most recent example is Time Magazine's new cover story, "The Optimism Bias":

[A] growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain.

"The science of optimism, once scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces, is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness," says Tali Sharot, in a the peppy, smiley-sounding article. "Is the human tendency for optimism a consequence of the architecture of our brains?" she asks. It is an interesting question, one which we would need to somehow get outside of the architecture of our brains to answer objectively, an achievement, unfortunately, which Sharot does not seem to have accomplished.

But that fact doesn't seem to have slowed her brain processes down any in leaping from her premises about the physical conditions that happen to accompany conscious states to conclusions about the meaning or implications of these states.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his critique of B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism, once unflatteringly described this procedure as the "zoological" or "rattomorphic" fallacy: "the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man." It is a process by which, as Hans Jonas puts it:

man-the-knower apprehends man-qua-lower-than-himself and in doing so achieves knowledge of man-qua-lower-than-man, since all scientific theory is of things lower than man-the-knower. It is on that condition that they can be subject to theory, hence to control, hence to use.

There is a whole literature on the issue of the cultural danger of the kinds of assumptions like those employed by Sharot in the Time article, and one of its best known commentators is Wendell Berry:

A little harder to compass is the danger that we can give up on life also by presuming to "understand" it—that is by reducing it to the terms of our understanding and by treating it as predictable or mechanical. The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.
This may have begun as a metaphor, but in the language as it is used (and as it affects industrial practice) it has evolved from metaphor through equation to identification. And this usage institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.

Michael Aeschliman too, in his book, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism, points out the cultural implications of this kind of scientific reductionism:

The distinction between means and ends, between things and objects on the one hand and persons and essences on the other is at the root of moral culture and civilization; it is a distinction that the characteristic procedures and terms of the natural sciences can neither discern nor make without violence, contradiction, and confusion, and for which they must depend upon philosophy and religion.

In other words, it is not just the cultural consequences of the view that we can simply reduce uniquely human characteristics to material mechanisms that is problematic. It is not just a threat to the culture, but a threat to reason itself. "It is not only an inhumane procedure," says Aeschliman, "it is simply false according to ordinary standards of human reason."

As Chesterton's pointed out in Orthodoxy, the whole idea that you can turn the gaze of a scientific instrument back on the viewer is one which undermines the entire operation itself. It is the "thought that stops thought." I once heard of a doctor who, marooned on a desert island, removed his own appendix. But it would have been an entirely different kind of thing to have done brain surgery on himself. He would, of course, need his brain to perform the surgery, but the procedure itself would prevent him from using it.
Only the Grey Sisters of ancient myth could take the eye out of its very socket and gaze upon themselves. But when we mortals attempt it, it leads only to delusion.
The humorist Peter Benchley once famously described his experience in a college science class where he spent the whole term drawing an image of his own eyelash as he viewed it in a microscope, all the while thinking it was the object in the slide. Putting the brain under the microscope has the inherent disadvantage of objectifying the very thing that is doing the objectifying, calling the whole process into question.

This is, of course, one of the main points of Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape, which we reviewed here.

But in addition to being impossible, what people like Sharot and Harris think they can do--understand conscious states by ferreting out the material conditions accompanying them--is based on a faulty premise. All such discussions are premised on the Identity Theory of Mind, which holds that "states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain." It has the disadvantage of having been pretty soundly refuted. You can say of a brain, for example, how much it weighs, but you cannot say that of a mind. Just because one state is simultaneous with another, does not mean the two states are the same. Having a heart is always accompanied by having a kidney. But having a heart and having a kidney are not the same thing.

I propose that those who examine their heads in this way should have their heads examined--by someone other than themselves. People who believe these claims should have their own brains examined to see if their beliefs about the chemical and evolutionary origin of beliefs has a chemical and evolutionary origin. And if they do, then we need to consider what the scientific and philosophical implications of this are.

If a belief--such as the one that holds that beliefs are the result of a purely causal physical process--is the result of a purely causal physical process, can it at the same time be considered the result of a rational process, the only process according to which such beliefs can be considered true?

The Sharot piece includes a detailed diagram of a brain, with pointers to the areas of the brain associated with optimistic thoughts. What we need is a diagram of Sharot's brain that tells us where she gets the idea that conscious states such as optimism can be explained by pointing to the areas of the brain associated with these conscious states.

What would happen if, instead of optimism, Sharot had trained her reductionist science on the tools by which she conducts her analysis in the first place? What happens when the scientist tries to reduce rationality itself to chemical or material processes? Does anything remain? If that is all her theory is--some chance concatenation of chemical events, then would there be any reason to believe them to be true?

8 comments:

'It has the disadvantage of having been pretty soundly refuted. You can say of a brain, for example, how much it weighs, but you cannot say that of a mind.'

We cannot weigh a fairy.

Therefore fairies exist.

'Just because one state is simultaneous with another, does not mean the two states are the same.'

I agree. But it certainly doesn't mean the two are not the same. In fact, the more parsimonious and simple assumption is that they are in fact the same.

If we have ample evidence that what we do the the brain predictably leads to changes in the mind, we have very good reason to think that one is simply dependent on the other and requires no additional explanation. Any additional postulations - especially those that the claimants insist are not even verifyable empirically, are utterly superfluous and add nothing to our understanding.

For example, could you maybe give an example of a working of the 'mind' that is independent of a physical brain? How would we go about verifying this example?

'Having a heart is always accompanied by having a kidney. But having a heart and having a kidney are not the same thing.'

Hearts and kidney are both physical organs that we can identify, 'weigh' as you say and therefore verify as existing concomittantly in a human being. We can also determine their structure, function and components empirically and conclude that they are not the sma ething.

How this corresponds as an analogy to a physical organ like the brain and a supposedly immaterial 'mind' which you yourself say can't be weighed and which supposedly has no characteristics we can empirically determine is not quite clear, I'm afraid.

Singring, You are again kicking off from a materialist rather than a scientific position. The two really are not the same. Materialism is a metaphysical doctrine that claims to know, with no possibility of evidence, what actually objectively exists (in this case, the claim is matter, energy, space-time etc). Science is a methodology for studying phenomenal reality with a view to predicting future observations from the patterns (laws). It is an abuse of reason to claim that science supports ontological claims. To say that science proves that matter exists is at least as unreasonable as saying that science proves that God exists. You would not accept the latter, so why the former?

For us humans, the only basics are thought and information. Our concepts (which is all that they are) of matter, energy, space and time are built out of these. If we assume realism (i.e. this isn’t all just a dream), the information must come from somewhere but we cannot "see" the generator because it is not itself phenomenal. Is that so hard to follow?

You are making the same assumption here you made previously which is to argue that ontological entities must somehow be fully comprehensible via phenomena and that, frankly, is misleading you. To say that something must exist because you can weigh it is to say that something which is phenomenal must be ontological. Surely, you can see such an argument is absurd!

'To say that science proves that matter exists is at least as unreasonable as saying that science proves that God exists.'

I have never claimed that science 'proves' that matter exists - in fact if you will check my recent replies to Martin's post on 'Arguing in the Void', I state that accepting that the universe and matter exist is an assumption which may be false, but which almost everyone seems to accept. I am perfectly happy to take it on as a basic assumption.

However, accepting that anything other than matter exists or that anything exists 'ontologically' in addition to existing physically - which may of course be true - is a metaphysical assumption I and many, many other people are not willing to just accept on good faith and it is therefore up to those who make those claims to support them.

Unfortunately, Martin has not even been able to give us a definition of what some of these alledged things (e.g. souls) are. Maybe he will have a really good example of something the mind does that cannot be explained by material processes in the brain - we'll have to wait and see.

'For us humans, the only basics are thought and information.'

I don't buy this for a second and I'm not even sure what you mean by 'information'. As far as I understand it, 'information' requires an arrangement of physical, material things and therefore cannot be basic since it relies on a prior assumption.

'To say that something must exist because you can weigh it is to say that something which is phenomenal must be ontological. Surely, you can see such an argument is absurd!'

First of all, I never said that something having mass is a prerequisite for it existsing in any sense. What I did say is that if something has mass, we have a pretty good reason to think that it physically exists.

What strikes me as absurd is that you are apparently arguing that we shouldn't rely at all on what we can observe, measure, repeat, test and examine to determine what the reality of any given object or entity is - we should rely on....what exactly? What some theologian thinks is a good idea for its 'ontology'? What Aristotle thought was a good idea? You are implying that - at least in some cases - the physical properties of an object do not accurately reflect what you refer to as their 'ontological' reality. How so?

Here's what I propose: Brains are not really brains. 'Ontologically', they are immaterial, weightless extra-dimensional beings that love to play practical jokes on each other and posess humans to do just that.

"but which almost everyone seems to accept. I am perfectly happy to take it on as a basic assumption."

Then you are wrong and the "everyone accepts" reasoning is embarrassingly weak. Almost everyone watches the X-Factor: is that an argument that we should do so as well? We live in a seriously dumbed-down society. In this context, democracy is a poor road to truth!

"I and many, many other people are not willing to just accept on good faith "

It's not a question of what you are *not* willing to accept. It's more what you *do* accept uncritically that bothers me! Did you ever study quantum theory? If not, you need to do so!

"'For us humans, the only basics are thought and information.'

I don't buy this for a second and I'm not even sure what you mean by 'information'."

Information is well defined. It's that which removes uncertainty. It is the essence of your observations. So which of these do you deny: thought (then who am I talking to); or information (then what are we exchanging)?

"What I did say is that if something has mass, we have a pretty good reason to think that it physically exists."

Yes you did say that and it begs the question: what do you mean by "physically exists"? I think we should be told!

"You are implying that - at least in some cases - the physical properties of an object do not accurately reflect what you refer to as their 'ontological' reality. How so?"

Of course they don't. Get a grip man! Could you reverse engineer the Matrix from the impressions the users had? And, while I'm not in any way saying this is The Matrix (we couldn't tell even if it was is the point), the logic is unassailable: physical properties are experiential not ontological.

"Here's what I propose: Brains are not really brains." Of course they are brains, by definition. Your statement is nonsensical. I might as well say you are not really you. But they are still phenomenal not ontological entities. They have weights and linear dimensions (as they would have in the Matrix world) measurable by observation but they are not, to reiterate, ontological. Like all material things, they are (with some licence) best viewed as our interpretations of unseen data structures in objective reality.

'Then you are wrong and the "everyone accepts" reasoning is embarrassingly weak. Almost everyone watches the X-Factor: is that an argument that we should do so as well? We live in a seriously dumbed-down society. In this context, democracy is a poor road to truth!'

Do you not accept that the universe and what it contains is real?

'Information is well defined. It's that which removes uncertainty. It is the essence of your observations.'

I'm sorry, but that is just incoherent nonsense to me. The 'essence' of observations? What on earth is that supposed to mean? Do you mean to say that information is certainty?

'So which of these do you deny: thought (then who am I talking to); or information (then what are we exchanging)?'

I don't deny thought or information, I simply don't see how they could possibly be the most basic principles. Thought and information both require matter, at least as far as we can tell.

'Yes you did say that and it begs the question: what do you mean by "physically exists"? I think we should be told!'

I mean that it exists as a part of the universe, as a part of the material, as a part of that which almost all people basically accept constitutes 'existence'.

Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think that a table is not real, that a chair is not real, that a tree is not real, that you are not real. That would make you a solipsist. Is that what you are?

'Of course they don't.'

Why not?

'Could you reverse engineer the Matrix from the impressions the users had? '

How do you know there is a Matrix?

'...physical properties are experiential not ontological.'

Once again you are simply asseeting by implication that there is such a thing as 'ontological' existence that is other than or different from physical existence. You can say it a hundred times -it won't make it true. What I am still looking for from you is any coherent argument that there even is a reason to think that a chair, for example has some sort of 'ontological' existance as opposed to or in addition to its physical existence as part of the universe.

'Like all material things, they are (with some licence) best viewed as our interpretations of unseen data structures in objective reality.'

There you go asserting again. How do you know there are any such 'unseen data structures'? How do you know a brain is really not a brain.

And you completely dodged the question. I gave you a specific example of what I think may be the 'unseen data structure' - namely these extra-dimensional beings that posess humans.

The problem we have here is with the word "real". I have used it with two quite different meanings and I have tried, very respectfully, to explain to you why such a distinction is necessary. You however continue to insist on conflating the two concepts without any explanation of why you feel it is justifiable to do so.

"I'm sorry, but that is just incoherent nonsense to me. The 'essence' of observations? What on earth is that supposed to mean? Do you mean to say that information is certainty?"

I'm sorry too, but don't you think that calling something “incoherent nonsense” without checking first if the problem is with your own knowledge, is just a little arrogant? Information theory is the basis of all communications (and measurement can be viewed as communication). In simple terms, the information associated with an event (the uncertainty removed) is a measure of its probability. E.g. an event of probability 0.5 carries 1 bit of information.

"I don't deny thought or information, I simply don't see how they could possibly be the most basic principles. Thought and information both require matter, at least as far as we can tell"

They are conceptually more basic, independently of theory. Think of it this way. You know from first person experience that thought exists. Now, without explicit or implicit reference to information (or observation) tell me what matter is. As a finale, now explain why you are convinced the same objectively exists?

"I mean that it exists as a part of the universe, as a part of the material, as a part of that which almost all people basically accept constitutes 'existence'."

You are trapped in circularity here because so-far you haven’t defined "the material". You also seem to be saying that a thing exists because almost all people think it exists. How subjective a definition is that? Would you claim that demons once existed because almost all people thought they did?

"Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think that a table is not real, that a chair is not real, that a tree is not real, that you are not real."

Again your catch-all use of the word “real”! OK, let me put it this way: a chair is exactly as real or unreal as matter is. So once you've explained to me what, in your view, matter “really” is, the crux of the debate should be obvious to us both. After all, since the word is so core to your faith, surely you can define it or at least explain what it is made of?

"That would make you a solipsist. Is that what you are?"

Please stop misusing that word. If I was a solipsist I would hold that you are part of my dream. I do genuinely believe that you are real.

"How do you know there is a Matrix?"

I don't know and never believed there was. Do you know what a counter-example is and why one might wish to use one? If so you will get why I mentioned the Matrix.

"How do you know a brain is really not a brain."

Why are you persisting with this? Nobody is suggesting that a brain is not a brain. That would be a contradiction.

"And you completely dodged the question. I gave you a specific example ...namely these extra-dimensional beings that posess humans. How do you know this is not true?"

I’m sorry, I judged that the question was not asked in good faith but since you repeat it, I will give it the benefit of the doubt. We don't have *any* grounds *whatsoever* for making statements about the nature of objective reality. Scientifically, such statements are neither right nor wrong unless they are logically inconsistent or conflict with experimental results. If you think otherwise please give a logical argument stating your assumptions unambiguously.

'You however continue to insist on conflating the two concepts without any explanation of why you feel it is justifiable to do so.'

I did not conflate the two concepts - I asked you to justify why you think one of them ('ontological existence') is a valid concept at all. My question was intended to elicit whether or not you agree that a chair, for instance, has a physical existence. Apparently you do.

So we both agree - a chair has physical existence. I work from the basic assumption that this is its objective reality - that it is a chair. You claim that this may not be so - that it may also have an 'ontological ' existence that is contained in some kind of 'hidden data' which represents the chair's actual objective reality.

Since you are making that claim, it is up to you to support it, not up to me to disprove it. So far, all I have heard to this end is that a chair *could* have such an ontological reality (its actualy objective reality) to it and that my idea of its reality as merely physical (what I think of it as its objective reality) is therefore false. I fully, completely agree. It *could* be so. But that in no way suggests that it *is* so and it is entirely sufficient to suppose that the physical reality of the chair is in fact its objective reality and that is all there is to that chair.

'In simple terms, the information associated with an event (the uncertainty removed) is a measure of its probability.'

We may be talking past each other in this point. If you are simply using 'information' in the sense of a human recording external reality, then I agree with you - 'information' is basic to humans. But if you are trying to imply that information is more fundamental than matter itself, then I will just reiterate that information - even if defined in the sense of event probabilities - is dependent on matter that events can happen to.

'You are trapped in circularity here because so-far you haven’t defined "the material".'

I wasn't trying to support my definition of what is real, I was trying to reiterate, rephrase it because you seemed to be confused as to my usage. I had already clearly stated some posts before that I accept physical reality (or material reality or whatever you want to call it) as a basic assumption. In that sense I cannot support it by argument in the same way that a mathematician cannot support A = A by argument. I have further argued that, save for a few mentally unstable people, this is a shared basic assumption - one that you apparently also hold as you seem to agree that a brain exists in this sense.

This *may* be a flase assumption. It *may* also be a false assumption physical reality is congruent with objective reality. But you need to give me some good arguments that this is so.

Where you and I and many, many other people part ways, is the question of any *additional* sense of reality or whether or not physical reality acxcurately replects objective reality. You have asserted many times that such an additional, 'ontological' sense exists and that it may be the accurate, objective reality we are looking for, but you have not supported this idea by argument in any way. All you have done is speculate on the issue.

'As a finale, now explain why you are convinced the same objectively exists?'

Because I have no reason to think otherwise. I have no reason to think that what I perceive as physically existance does not accurately reflect objective existence. Maybe you have a good reason - I'd like to hear it.

'I don't know and never believed there was.'

Then why are we having this discussion?

If your best argument to dissuade me from assuming that the objective reality of a chair is identical with the physical reality I perceive is because it *could* be otherwise, then I remain unconvinced. You are introducing assumptions that are unnecessary. I agree with you in principle - we cannot ultimately say that the physical reality of a chair is identical to its objective reality. But give me one good reason why I should assume otherwise?

'We don't have *any* grounds *whatsoever* for making statements about the nature of objective reality. Scientifically, such statements are neither right nor wrong unless they are logically inconsistent or conflict with experimental results.'

Here's where you are arguing in a cricle. Why should objective reality conform to logic?

Finally, I will say this: I think we've drifted from the original question and I can't see where we disagree if we both concur that speculating about 'souls' or any other 'ontological' entities or realities that have no effect on physical reality is invalid.